1. actually generated reasonable amounts of income,
2. aligned with their own (and their audience’s) tolerance for visible ads onsite, and
3. involved brands and/or ad networks that carried ads of reasonable quality and could deliver ads of interest to the community.

Over the years more than a few startups have tried to provide an alternative to ad-support through various micro-payment / donation schemes. After all, it’s totally reasonable for Content Creators to ask viewers to chip in a few shekels for content they enjoy, right? They all take a slightly different tactic, but Centup, Dwolla, Flattr, Google One Pass (RIP), Paypal’s donate button, TipTheWeb, znak it have tried and struggled to get lots of traction. Mostly, I venture, because even passionate audiences are more stingy about click-per-post support than expected.Continue reading Tiip Jar: startup Ad network concept aimed at Creators→

This weekend I’m headed up to Dalian, China to work with the 2013 crop of startups at Chinaccelerator. I’m not a startup fundraising expert, but I do live in PowerPoint so I hope to help the teams home their pitches as they warm up for the Chinaccelerator demo day next week in Beijing.

This is more or less my first experience as a “mentor” in this sort of scenario — though friends have listened to me bloviate plenty about startups and some Techyizu community members have derived advice from things I’ve said — and I’m quite excited to experience the energy, zeal and dedication from these teams.

I’ve been a heavy user of RSS since the beginning of feed readers, starting with netvibes, then on to bloglines, and for the past many years, Google Reader. In the right sidebar I have a closely curated list of my favorite websites, but those are by no means the totality of my blogroll. I’ve decided to share my blogroll, topic by topic, so people know which content I try to shove in my mind-grapes on a regular basis.